Kristin Entler presents OF WATER NEVER CEASING with Andrew Mack
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Kristin Entler will visit City Lights on Saturday, August 22nd at 3:00pm to share their new poetry collection Of Water Never Ceasing in conversation with Andrew Mack.
***To keep everyone involved in this event safe, masks will be required for attendance and provided by City Lights***
OF WATER NEVER CEASING is a poetry collection written from within the lived realities of chronic illness, treatment, and survival. Across these poems, Kristin Entler traces how the body becomes a site of ongoing care, interruption, and endurance, and how daily life reshapes itself around medical systems, fatigue, and uncertainty.
Structured as a sustained sequence rather than a single arc, the collection moves through hospitals, exam rooms, homes, and moments of waiting. Entler writes with precision about diagnosis and treatment, but also about what happens outside the clinical frame: friendships strained by unpredictability, intimacy altered by pain, and the quiet labor of staying oriented to the present. The poems attend to bodily processes with clarity and restraint, resisting metaphor where it would soften the facts.
Throughout the book, water functions as both presence and necessity. Hydration, infusion, flooding, and depletion recur not as symbols of cleansing or rebirth, but as markers of survival. The title reflects the book’s insistence on continuation rather than cure. This is not a narrative of recovery, but of persistence within conditions that do not resolve.
OF WATER NEVER CEASING also interrogates the language surrounding illness. Medical terminology, spiritual shorthand, and well-meaning consolation are tested against lived experience. Entler writes from within these systems while refusing their simplifications, insisting on accuracy, attention, and dignity.
The final poems remain grounded in the ongoing nature of care. There is no closing gesture toward restoration. Instead, the collection affirms the daily work of living inside a body that demands vigilance and adaptation, and the quiet resilience required to keep showing up.
In this remarkable debut, Kristin Entler offers a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of illness as a way of life, and of care as something practiced, imperfectly and continually, over time.
Kristin Entler is a writer and educator from Alabama, currently living in Western North Carolina. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Their work can be found in The Bitter Southerner,Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Porter House Review, BOOTH, and elsewhere. Entler can be found online @findmycure.
Andrew Mack is a poet, writer, and the driving force behind Loblolly Press, an indie publishing house with a passion for uplifting emerging voices—especially those from marginalized and underrepresented communities in the American South. His latest chapbook, Beasts of Chase, is available now. He lives in Asheville with his husband.
***To keep everyone involved in this event safe, masks will be required for attendance and provided by City Lights***
OF WATER NEVER CEASING is a poetry collection written from within the lived realities of chronic illness, treatment, and survival. Across these poems, Kristin Entler traces how the body becomes a site of ongoing care, interruption, and endurance, and how daily life reshapes itself around medical systems, fatigue, and uncertainty.
Structured as a sustained sequence rather than a single arc, the collection moves through hospitals, exam rooms, homes, and moments of waiting. Entler writes with precision about diagnosis and treatment, but also about what happens outside the clinical frame: friendships strained by unpredictability, intimacy altered by pain, and the quiet labor of staying oriented to the present. The poems attend to bodily processes with clarity and restraint, resisting metaphor where it would soften the facts.
Throughout the book, water functions as both presence and necessity. Hydration, infusion, flooding, and depletion recur not as symbols of cleansing or rebirth, but as markers of survival. The title reflects the book’s insistence on continuation rather than cure. This is not a narrative of recovery, but of persistence within conditions that do not resolve.
OF WATER NEVER CEASING also interrogates the language surrounding illness. Medical terminology, spiritual shorthand, and well-meaning consolation are tested against lived experience. Entler writes from within these systems while refusing their simplifications, insisting on accuracy, attention, and dignity.
The final poems remain grounded in the ongoing nature of care. There is no closing gesture toward restoration. Instead, the collection affirms the daily work of living inside a body that demands vigilance and adaptation, and the quiet resilience required to keep showing up.
In this remarkable debut, Kristin Entler offers a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of illness as a way of life, and of care as something practiced, imperfectly and continually, over time.
Kristin Entler is a writer and educator from Alabama, currently living in Western North Carolina. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Their work can be found in The Bitter Southerner,Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Porter House Review, BOOTH, and elsewhere. Entler can be found online @findmycure.
Andrew Mack is a poet, writer, and the driving force behind Loblolly Press, an indie publishing house with a passion for uplifting emerging voices—especially those from marginalized and underrepresented communities in the American South. His latest chapbook, Beasts of Chase, is available now. He lives in Asheville with his husband.
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Where is it happening?
3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherCity Lights Bookstore
